Complex: Real Trap Shit? The Commodification of Trap Music

What Trap is, exactly, isn’t a settled question, although for proponents of Trap, it has a distinct lineage. (For the purposes of this piece, we’ll use the capital-letter Trap to refer to the nebulous musical genre, and the lower-case trap in all other instances, which you will see is a necessary delineation.) Trap’s arrival raises questions about the way we think about “genre” in 2012, and provokes important questions about how we tell narratives about music, particularly in an era where listeners are increasingly discussing music as if they were historians